Critics of the Future

This is for the artist Everett Swinson of Norfolk,Va, who died in 1998 after several years fighting AIDS and continuing to make art and do community work until he literally could not move. Norfolk is like a very small galaxy with a mass of overlapping solar systems. When I lived there I spun in the peripheral orbit of a few of these systems, one being the Younger Artists Gang. Everett was one of the youngest and most accomplished. He had a sense of publicity that's necessary sometimes to get one's work noticed by the non-artistic world, the press, the evening news.
Every spring at the annual Ghent Arts Festival he was highly visible, doing some type of process or performance piece that usually necessitated his moving among the crowd. This guaranteed him a few seconds and sometimes even interview time on WAVY-TV and the other local stations. After Ghent moved out of the park at Stockley Gardens and went to Norfolk's Rouse monstrosity Waterside, Everett and some comrades organized an alternative arts event in Stockley Gardens, a protest against the glitzy new downtown Ghent Arts Festival.
Everett stood at one end of the park, near the entrance, holding a ream of multicolored paper. He disposed of it a sheet at a time, a fixed grin on his face. Halfway through the piece, a trio of tweenage boys arrived and paused on their skateboards.
" Shit man what's this?"
" I dunno, what's he doing?"
" We're gonna be late dude."
" Wait a second. I want to see .."
"See what, Jimmy?"
" This is weird man."
" Yeah it's weird."
" Come on you faggots. Let's get the hell out of here."
Later that evening I ran into Everett in a bar and complimented him on the success of the festival, showing him all the free Hare Krishna literature, including dietary advice, I'd
picked up. " Did you hear those kids?"
"You mean the ones who got scared and left?" He laughed. " The critics of the future."